Bite-Sized Game History: Atari Vs the World, Pac-Man Vs Superman, and Alien Vs Predator (on the Football Field)

When you look back at video games in the 1970s, there’s really only one name… Atari.

From Pong to Breakout to Asteroids, Atari filled the smoke-filled arcades with a parade of classic cabinets, and charged into the next decade on top of the world. We all know they didn’t stay there, but this edition of Bite-Sized Game History looks back at what the company was doing just before it all came crashing down.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

Andrew Borman, the Digital Games Curator at the Strong Museum of Play, recently unearthed footage from “Atari: The First Decade,” an anniversary celebration for employees that took place in 1982, during a recent digitization project.

The short video depicts a glitzy song-and-dance number that touted the company’s many accomplishments (“Just hear those quarters droppin’. See the players smilin'”), while also tempting fate just a little bit during the closer (“Atari will stay on top, where we belong!”).

Hopefully someone turns this into the musical extravaganza it deserves to be, but for now, we’ll have to make due with the weirdest 94 seconds in video game history:

If the 1970s belonged to Atari, then surely it’s fair to say that the early part of the 1980s were synonymous with Pac-Man. Namco’s voracious dot eater spawned an absolute mountain of tie-in merchandise over the years, but it’s one of the ones that didn’t happen that might be the most interesting.

Superman and Pac-Man was a tie-in comic in development at DC Comics in the early 1980s, and though it was never released, a few rough sketches remain. Lex Luthor is nowhere to be found, and instead the crossover would have involved the pair saving the Pac-People from a group of ghosts. Much more shocking is that the panels give Pac-Man superpowers, including the ability to morph into a car, a drill, and a helicopter (he also saves Superman from a Kryptonite-infused rope).

Here’s a look at one of the pages, which was recently shared by Gamasutra’s Simon Carless:

Finally, here’s yet another crossover that didn’t happen… but oh how I wish it had.

The Alien and Predator franchises have crossed over a lot since the first comic was published by Dark Horse in 1989. Their grudge match then spilled over into a (mostly unconnected) series of games beginning in 1993, and they were even paired up in a film in 2007. But like most major franchises, the Alien Vs Predator saga has left a lot of canceled projects in its wake, including a football game for the Sega Genesis known as Cosmic Hard Bowl.

Yes, you read that right:

Thanks to concept art discovered by the National Videogame Museum, we now know that Cosmic Hard Bowl would have restaged the conflict between the Alien and the Predator on the gridiron. There’s no information on the developer or the publisher, but the museum was kind enough to translate the Japanese text in a post on their website (NVMUSA.org), and it’s even weirder than you can imagine.

“Mankind had neutralized the 400+ year war between Aliens and Predators. Now they have agreed to finalize the conflict by American Football on Earth. The Alien Football League and the Predator Football League were born and fierce battles engaged for the Super Bowl Title. There was only one new rule. The quarterback must be human.”

Each intergalactic monster would have fielded six teams in the Cosmic Hard Bowl, including the Los Angeles Blade Runners for the Aliens and the New York Psychic Murders for the Predators. No word on if the human quarterbacks would have been modeled after Sigourney Weaver and Arnold Schwarzenegger

I guess that’s enough for now, but thanks to Andrew Borman, Simon Carless, and the National Videogame Museum for injecting a little craziness into this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.